Over the last few weeks I have tried to explain to a few people the difference between the BlackBerry Bridge and the Internet Tethering on the BlackBerry PlayBook. The BlackBerry Bridge simply proxies certain information like email, contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, and BBM from a BlackBerry to the PlayBook and shows that information on the PlayBook. It looks like it may give BES users access to the companies intranet but that is about it.

Internet Tethering on the other hand is simply using the Bluetooth Dial Up Networking (DUN) profile that many phones support. This was just confirmed again in a leaked guide by Kevin @CrackBerry. That means any phone that supports Dial Up Networking over Bluetooth, which many feature phones even support, will be able to use their phone to get to the internet from a PlayBook.

This all comes with one major caveat. Carriers are going to want to get paid. That means I can see them tacking on some $20 or so charge a month for “PlayBook Tethering.” What would be really cool is if these plans would work with the upcoming Mobile Wi-Fi Hotspot features coming in the next generation of BlackBerrys.

Check out the details from the guide at this link. I have spoken to a few devs and it does not look like they will be able to create an app like “Tether” with the current SDK’s available for the PlayBook. On the other hand my discussions with a few internal RIM devs hint that quite a few more API’s are coming soon.